The Heck is a "Book Stamp?"

“Just because you give something a catchy name doesn’t mean your audience knows what you are talking about. “

-Me speaking to myself after multiple people ask what the heck a “Book Stamp” is.

TLDR: A book stamp is a stamp I make based off of a book I have read. It is one image to capture a main aspect of the book. They are a little too simplistic to be alternate cover art, but same idea there.  Example: The book stamp for “The Hobbit” is the hobbit hole where Bilbo Baggins lives. This one is intentionally simple to get the point across, but they aren’t all like that. You can read further about my history with reading and a further explanation of how the book stamps came to be.

For me, elementary school was the glory days of reading. Not only was there dedicated time set aside in your school day to read, there were incentives to get your “AR Points.” (Accelerated Reader Points.) These were earned by completing an online test about the book you read. Each book had an amount of points you could earn for scoring a 100% on the test. Each question you missed would knock off the points you could earn. You had one shot to take the test and get the points. No retaking, no going back and trying again, so you better have actually read the book. At the end of the year we got some sort of reward I believe, a pizza party maybe? I honestly can’t remember now, because that wasn’t the important part of what I remember from that time.

It was something lost on me when I got to middle school. The comfort of a small and sweet elementary school was replaced with the harsh realities of the larger middle school. Soon it became important to do everything in your power to not be bullied for being weird or nerdy. You forget about the things you actually enjoy and your survival instincts kick in instead. Enjoyment gets lost and fitting in takes priority.

Reading wasn’t as fun in high school. It was informative, sure, but reading for the joy of it was lost. “Remember everything you enjoyed as a kid? Well what we made it so important and forced that it wasn’t fun anymore.” Learning, reading, even sports and art for me were taken to a level where the joy would get lost. It became part of the list of things I had to do and that took the fun right out of it.

My happiest memories of reading were in third grade. There were places made just for reading in our classrooms. A loft with pillows, a corner with a beanbag chair, the soft carpet next to the bookshelf. You were allowed to read silly books about dragons, fairies and wizards. It wasn’t just something we “had” to do, it was fun. It didn’t matter if was cool and there wasn’t much pressure.

I’ll be 30 in less than a month and reflecting on my mid to late 20’s has shown me I really was able to find the joy in many things I loved again. I don’t think it’s ever too late to find the aspects of what you loved at different times in life and discover those feelings again. You just have to give yourself permission and the opportunity.

I started reading again at the beginning of 2023, I was 27 and was feeling ready to try new things. My friend group was doing a reading bingo, basically a way to read a lot of different types of books. Fiction, non-fiction, mystery, thriller, fantasy, historical, biography, lgbtq author, female author, male author, a holiday book, a classic book, every type of book you could think of. All you had to do was read one of every different type on the bingo board. I don’t think I fully completed it, but it was the best reintroduction to reading I could have had. I fell in love with reading again. Not every single book, but it gave me the chance to learn what liked. I got consumed by the stories and my mind was transported to other worlds, in other bodies, experiencing other things. Things could be going wrong in the world or my life, but a book offered an escape to somewhere else.

I’m a person who plays out the visual scenes in my head and can see a relatively clear picture. I know a lot of people do this, but I sometimes feel the need to draw out the images I see. They usually come out as one specific moment in the book, and that’s how the book stamps came to be.

I could have made paintings or normal drawings, but I do like the ability to recreate an original work with printmaking. With printmaking, you carve an image in material and then you can print that image over and over on paper with ink. It is essentially, a stamp. These ones I make are pretty small, so that’s why I just call them a stamp.

The book stamp is an image I have come up to represent a book I have read in full. I’m not making any stamps about books I haven’t read, because I wouldn’t understand what the image needed to be if I haven’t read it. There are some I am already thinking of remaking. Maybe the stamp didn’t turn out well or maybe there’s a better image I came up with. They are works in progress, but I want to make posts about each of them explaining the image I chose and the significance they have to the book. I’m no book reviewer, but I feel a little better talking about books in the context of art.